wordpress

This is a pet peeve of mine – some plugin and theme authors (to make their lives easier) set “sslverify = false” in their Pro / Premium version update checks and/or other HTTP requests.

Luckily a few security and error checking plugins like the Query Monitor plugin (for example), will show a warning if the WordPress wp_remote_get() function is executed with “sslverify = false”. To make sure this is never the case, you can use the following filters in your functions.php file.

I’ve just released version 1.1.0 of JSM’s Block Filter Output – a new plugin to monitor the content filter and fix incorrectly coded filter hooks (that send text to the webpage instead of returning it, as all filter hooks must).

A notice is also sent to the PHP error log when webpage output is detected:

[01-Oct-2017 01:48:28 UTC] Block Filter Output: The “ClassName::echoText” filter hook with priority 10 in the “the_content” filter has mistakenly provided some webpage output. All WordPress filter hooks must return their text – not send it to the webpage output. Please contact the author of that filter hook and report this issue as a coding error / bug. Incorrect webpage output: —BEGIN— <strong>Some output that should have been returned instead of echo’ed.</strong> —END—

The plugin is fully tested and compatible with PHP v7.x (PHP v5.3 or better required).

A new WPSSO Ratings and Reviews (WPSSO RAR) extension for WPSSO has been released. This Free plugin extends the WordPress comment system with a new star rating and review feature — ratings and reviews can be enabled / disabled per post, new reviews are labeled as reviews (not comments), a star rating can be required before reviews are accepted, replies to reviews are properly labeled as replies / comments, and the colors of star ratings can be customized from the settings page.

A new WPSSO User Locale Selector (WPSSO UL) extension for WPSSO and WordPress version 4.7+ has been released. This Free extension provides a user locale / language / region selector in the WordPress admin back-end and front-end toolbar menus. This allows users to easily change their preferred locale setting from the toolbar instead of having to update their WordPress profile page.

The default WordPress behavior is to apply the user locale preference to the admin back-end only — this plugin can optionally extend the user locale preference to the front-end webpage as well (enabled by default in the SSO > User Locale settings page).

If you’re using the WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup (WPSSO JSON) extension (and if not, you really should), you may have noticed that Google’s Schema validation tools can pickup additional incomplete / inaccurate Schema markup from your theme templates. WPSSO JSON defines its JSON-LD markup as the “main entity” for the webpage — so Google will prefer this markup over any other found in the webpage — but you may still want to cleanup that incomplete / inaccurate Schema Microdata from your theme templates. The new WPSSO Strip Schema Microdata (WPSSO SSM) extension is a Free plugin that removes Schema Microdata markup from the webpage body section automatically, leaving the Schema JSON-LD markup as the only Schema markup in the webpage.

Schema markup in JSON-LD format, which is not discussed here, has become essential for good SEO. The current version of Yoast SEO offers some basic Schema JSON-LD markup, while the WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup add-on for WPSSO Core provides extensive and complete Schema markup for Articles, Events, Images, Local Business, Products, Recipes, Reviews Videos, and more.

The social sharing aspects discussed in this article (meta tags, images, videos, etc.) from Yoast SEO and WPSSO Core are still mostly relevant, although Twitter has since dropped the Gallery, Photo, and Product cards.

A few years ago, most website visitors came from Google Search results. Plugins designed to optimize your content for Google Search became increasingly popular, and part of many “must have” plugin lists. Recently though, that trend has been shifting, as the percentage of visitors coming from social websites is increasing — often matching and sometimes out-pacing — the number of visitors from Google Search. Traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins, like WordPress SEO by Yoast for example, have adapted to this change by stepping away from their core purpose, and re-using their SEO content to generate additional meta tags for social websites. But how good is an SEO plugin at addressing the needs of social websites? We compare WordPress SEO to WPSSO, a dedicated social sharing optimization plugin to find out.

There are a few functions available to retrieve the URL and size of an image in the WordPress Media Library, but few people know that these functions will often lie about an image’s dimensions.

As an example, let’s define a custom image size of 1000 x 1000 cropped, and use image_downsize() to retrieve the URL and size of an image ID (this example can be used with wp_get_attachment_image_src() as well). I’ll use list() in the example, instead of an array variable for the return values, to keep the code more readable. ;-)